Hello from Louisiana

[Les L]

Hello everyone,

I've ben reading information on here for the last couple of month's. I want to thank all of you for the information you provide, it has helped me in making a decision on what I will be doing in the near future and I have learned a lot about the tools I will need, the current value of them and what I will need to set up my shop and get started.

I am just getting started with blacksmithing, currently gathering tools and expanding my current shop to turn it into my smithy. I have been a welder/fabricator for the 40+  years, always interested in blacksmithing, my Grandfather and one of my uncles were blacksmiths, but I did not have/take the time to get started in it, but all the excuses will be gone in the next few months when I won't have to head to work at 4:30 every morning. After I showed my wife some pictures of the wonderful work everyone on this site does I think she is more excited than me for me to get started heating and beating iron.

I have located my Grandfather's and uncle's forges and will pick them up in the next couple of weeks, I have managed to acquire a Fisher and a Vulcan anvil, a post vise, and several pair of tongs so far (TPAAAT works good, my wife says I'm scrounging, but I was able to show her it is an official technique). I'll post pictures of them in the tool section after I finish cleaning everything up.   

[Frosty]

Welcome aboard Les, glad to have you. Sounds like you have a real gift for salvaging good stuff. Just don't get too carried away, you only need so much equipment and tooling to be pretty independent of needing more.

The real things to consider are safety on many fronts. Personal safety means PPE and good work practices. Know when to take a break, eat lunch or knock off for the day. Fire safety and noxious/poisonous smoke/fumes precautions can be life savers. If you attach your shop to the house you need CO monitors and alarms, not only in the shop but in the house. CO is insidious, it'll follow wall spaces, rafters, floor joists, every darned space available and you need to keep ahead of it. It's a B A D thing.

If you've been reading here you know the blacksmith's craft is addictive and we're your friendly pushers. We'll help! 

Frosty The Lucky.

[Daswulf]

Welcome to the addiction.

sounds like your wife will keep you busy with projects for the house.

[Les L]

Frosty 

Thanks for the reply encouragement and information. The shops a few hundred feet from any other structure and well ventilated. I’m used to working in the heat doing farm work and welding on live natural gas lines but reminders are always welcome. It’s what we call being your brothers keeper. I have the co monitors on my list of needed equipment for the shop. 

Daswulf

you wouldn’t believe the ideas she can come up with  if she buys a book with projects in it I’ll be working 7/12 again 

 

[Daswulf]

Well, please share your journey with us. Being a welder compliments forging as your "toolbox" is bigger in a way.  more/easier possibilities in bringing things together. Making tools to make tools to make stuff will keep you busy while you're at it. 

 

[Frosty]

3 hours ago, Les L said:

you wouldn’t believe the ideas she can come up with  if she buys a book with projects in it I’ll be working 7/12 again 

There are worse honey do projects, Les. 

Frosty The Lucky.

[Lou L]

Welcome aboard , Les.  It sounds like you have done your reading and are well on your way.  It will be a cool feeling the first time you get to light up your grandfather’s forge for sure!  If you have the time you should start planning out some first projects with drawings.  The visualizing is a great start.  Managing to get the steel to do what you want it to is another thing entirely:)

Lou

[Les L]

Frosty,

Your right , there are worse honey do's, like the painting she has had me doing.

Lou,

One of the earliest things I can remember about my grandfather is turning the crank on that forge, it wasn't lit, but he sure got mad when I had it cranked up so high I blew all the coal out of it, I had it sounding like an air raid siren. We were living out of state when his shop was torn down and I've been wondering what happened to the forge for the last 50 years, I finally asked the right person and will be able to get it. 

I've been gathering metal for years, most of it is mild steel, but I have been able to get some high carbon in the stack to make some tools with lately.

[Frosty]

Deb want's a good paint job so I'm off that hook. The spousal unit's honey do list is like calculating Pi, there's only the one end when you say I Do. Happily our dogs are small and stick close so picking up isn't too onerous. 

Neither of my Grandfathers was a blacksmith, my paternal Grandfather was a logger and died in the flue epidemic that ended WWI. My maternal Grandfather was a federal circuit judge and passed away when I was maybe 5. I remember sitting in his lap once but that's about it. 

The family doesn't talk about the "interesting" relatives.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Les L]

I only knew my paternal grandparents. Grandfather raised 10 children with his forge, a grist mill and 40 acres. Dad was in the Military so I wasn't able to spend much time with my grandparents. I spent the summer with them in the early 70's, granddad was 85, I was 13-14, he was still farming and had about 20 head of cattle. We were up every morning before daylight, I pumped water into trough while he fed the cattle and grandmother milked the cow, then back home for breakfast, fresh eggs, milk and home made bread, butter and preserves, so we could eat and get into the field at sunrise to pick corn all day by hand to put into the crib for the cattle's winter feed. Best summer I ever had, but I've always been told I wasn't very smart.

[Frosty]

Not strange or dumb at all, farm life is good honorable work and is a reward of it's own. We raised horses for a while starting when I was a preteen. It's good for a kid to have chores that MUST be done no matter what. Hauling and stacking hay was good quality time with Dad. I used to spend a couple few weeks on a family friend's horse ranch in Antelope Valley Ca. then later on their ranch near Gila Bend Arizona.

You have to experience the: smell of freshly turned soil or mown hay, the way the cows line up in order for milking or how the friendlier ones gently lean into you as you hook them up to the milking machine. The way a horse will rub it's head on your chest while you ready the bit. The chickens flocking around you when you're carrying the feed bucket, how seriously mean geese can be, what it's like to be attacked and spurred by the rooster and how that nonsense ends when you grab him out of the air by the neck and eyeball him till he settles. Works on geese too. How mischievous goats are, some very friendly some not so, some downright dangerous. Bucks in the rut just stand back.

Good memories, good times. Not a thing wrong with liking time on the farm or ranch.

Frosty The Lucky.

[ThomasPowers]

I used to stay with my grandparents and help out on their farm---of course they raised minnows; but there are family tales of me in single digits in water up to my chin hanging on for dear life to one end of a 3 man seine while my grandfather swept  a minnow pond with the other.  Drank iron sulfur water directly from the irrigation pump; picked a lot of blackberries that grandmother used to make cobblers from.  Being part of the family "team" was a great childhood memory.  Very different than some of my friends who HAD to do farm work and so fought to get away from the farm. (I once shared a lab bench with one who left rural Oklahoma for the Navy...)

[George N. M.]

Les,

I envy you being able to recover your grandfather's and uncle's forges.  It will make your heart happy to be following up the karma and spirit they put into them.

I was 7 when my grandfather who was a hunter, fisherman, and general outdoorsman died of a heart attack while pumping up his air mattress on a duck hunting trip.  Neither my father or my uncle were outdoor guys and I was a little boy living on the south side of Chicago.  So, my grandmother sold all his guns.  I grew up to move to Wyoming and became my grandfather's grandson.  I would pay a lot to be able to hunt with one of my grandfather's rifles or shotguns and be able to pass them on to my son.

I'm not really a touchy-feely kind of guy but every now and then when everything is going well and the metal is moving just right and the project is going exactly how I planned I feel a kinship with all the smiths who have gone before, all the way back to the bronze age.  It feels like they are looking over my shoulder with approval. 

One of the cool things about blacksmithing is that the basic techniques have changed so little over the centuries and millennia.  A Celtic smith of 500 BC and I couldn't understand a word of each others language but pretty quickly we could work in each others shop.  I'd have to learn how to use his hand bellows and charcoal fuel and he'd have to learn how to handle a crank blower and a coal/coke fire but other than that we'd do just fine.

Good luck and I think that you will find that smithing will be something you really enjoy and will be a very positive way to spend your retirement.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

[ThomasPowers]

Actually you would have to learn to use his helpers, the smith wouldn't be working the bellows ---harder than it sounds. I once was asked to demo a process at an open air museum in Germany, the forge, hammer, tongs were easy---having a striker when I was not used to one was the hard part. (Why yes, I did take a billet and borax on an international business trip...doesn't everyone?)

[George N. M.]

Thomas,

I think that it would depend on the size of the shop.  A small village might have a one man shop just as it has been down the ages and an itinerant smith might only have himself or temporary local help to rely on.  With a local farm boy assistant the Celtic equivalent of "When I nod my head hit it." could have become a reality.

What was your traveling billet made of?

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

[Les L]

Thanks to all for the kind words and encouragement.

I was able to identify the champion blower was my grandfather's and the forge and Canedy-Otto blower was my uncles. I've decided to hook the champion to the forge and use the hammer I found with them to forge my first item.

[Lsat]

where are you located in louisiana?

 

[Les L]

Livonia, outside  Baton Rouge.